The worrisome origins of our New India

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Editor's note: The past month has been grim even by the standards of Narendra Modi’s “New India”. We have been assailed by a series of spectacles that catch the breath: the political persecution of a fact-checker on the complaint of an anonymous tweeter, the meticulously orchestrated overthrow of a government in Maharashtra and a religiously inspired murder in Rajasthan. But the most disturbing event was the Supreme Court’s dismissal of Zakia Jafri’s plea to revisit Modi’s exoneration by a special investigation team commissioned by the apex court in 2008 to probe the sectarian carnage that swept through Gujarat in 2002. Jafri’s plea inconvenienced so many for a simple reason: it confronted them with the worrisome origins of this “New India”. Even if you refuse to accept the extensive claims that Narendra Modi and his administration conspired to aid and abet the sword-wielding Hindu mobs that rampaged through the state in February and March 2002, what is indisputable is that he and his government failed spectacularly to stop them. Gujarat has always stood out in a country with a long exposure to interreligious …